If you bought iLife 09, you’ll know that it’s filled with lots of new features. One of these is videos in GarageBand of professional musicians teaching you how to make better music.

If you’re not a music person, these are just taking up space on your hard drive — lots of space. 1.3 gigs of space to be exact. Here’s how to reclaim that space:

1. Delete the GarageBand Application. Go to the applications folder of your computer, scroll down to GarageBand and drag it to the trash. You be asked to enter your password.
2. Delete The Support Files. Go to the finder. Open the ‘Macintosh HD’, then ‘Library’ then ‘Application Support’. Here is where most of the big files are hiding. Scroll down to the ‘GarageBand’ folder and drag that to the trash as well. Ditto for your password.
3. Don’t Forget to Empty Your Trash

Now you’re done, and with 1.3 more gigs of space to fill with the files that matter to you.

If you’re still looking for more space saving tips, you should give monolingual and grandperspective a try.

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Header photograph by notsogoodphotography

Has your to-do list grown too large and cumbersome? Do you dread looking at all the work it represents? Then take a tip for culling your tasks from the Roman army: decimate your to-do list.

In Roman times, decimation was a tool to keep the military obedient. If a legion became mutinous, commanders executed one out of every ten soldiers to punish the group. (deci- from the Latin meaning ‘one tenth’).

Your to-do list is a tool that should work for you — it should help you get stuff done. If your to-do list no longer follows your orders, decimate it: kill off one in ten of the tasks lurking there. While the Romans forced the troops to randomly draw lots to decide their fate, you’re intentionally looking for two kinds of targets: low-value tasks and time-consuming tasks.

First, the low value items. Is there something on your list that won’t bring you much benefit? Kill it. You should limit your to-do list to tasks that must get done and tasks that you want to get done. Kill off to-do items that are just there because you feel that you should do them.

Second, the time-consuming items. Look for big, fat, slow-moving tasks. If an item on your to-do list will take a long time to complete ask yourself a difficult question: ‘is there something better I could do with this time instead?’ If there is, knock that item off.

If you can find a task that’s both low value and time consuming, don’t hesitate to strike the mortal blow.

After decimation you’ll find, as the Romans did, that your newer, slimmer list is much more useful and ready to follow your orders.

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Header photograph by Dave-F

At the start of the year, I created for myself The Great Early Wake-up Challenge. I’d been trying unsuccessfully to wake up early in the morning for some time and decided I needed to try a different strategy.

Using Paul Graham’s idea that the threat of public and humiliating failure leads to success, I decided to keep a record of my wake-up times on twitter. It’s amazing what a motivator it’s been knowing that people will notice if I get up late — and often send me messages asking why.

I set myself the goal of getting up by 05:15 every day so that I’d have enough time before the day began to work on my most important projects first. It’s not perfect, but I am learning tricks that I plan to post in an article later.

Since starting this project, I’ve gotten several emails from people who wanted to join the challenge and some who have already publicly stated their goals like kasterma, wakeymcwake, amphibios, mrdude1228 , nebopolis & aliented. Given this enthusiasm I’ve decided to make this a public challenge.

Want to wake up earlier and get more done? Then join the Great Early Wake-up Challenge. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make a resolution to change your habit of waking up early and set a goal.
2. Create a twitter account (if you don’t have one already) and publicly declare what your wake-up goal is.
3. First thing in the morning tweet what time you got out of bed.
4. Optional: send me an email or an @reply and let me know you’ve joined. For bonus points, use the hashtag #earlyup so that others can follow your progress and the conversation about waking up early in general.

Get started and good luck!

(Two suggestions from experience: if you’re easily distracted by the shiny things on the Internet, tweet your wake-up time via your phone. If you have the strength to resist the pull of the Internet then use textexpander to make the morning update easier. For example, I type ‘imup’ into twitter and textexpander automatically writes the date, time and #earlyup hashtag for me.)

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Header photograph by prakhar

The fastest way to free time in your schedule is also the hardest: learning to say ‘no’. It’s a tricky endeavor, doubly so when the person asking is in a position of authority. Here are some suggestions to make the process of saying ‘no’ less painful:

1. Repeat the ‘No’. People expect conversations to go this way:

   “Can you help with with project X?”

   “I’m sorry I can’t.”

   “Oh please? I’m really in over my head.”

   “Alright, what do you need?”

   Do not give in to this. When you say no, hold your ground. Politely repeat your ‘no’ answer.

2. No Excuses. Never give an excuse for why you can’t do something. If you give an excuse, it puts you on the defensive. The person asking will launch into an attack on why your excuse isn’t (to them) satisfactory. Stick with rule #1. (Not offering excuses, is a good rule in general, not just for saying ‘no’.)
3. Not Enough time. “I’m sorry, I’d like to be able to help right now, but my current projects take up all of my available time and I can’t afford to drop any of them.” This is not an excuse, this is the truth. You currently use all your available hours on something and if you’re prioritizing your life correctly all these tasks matter to you. You must not over schedule yourself and, more importantly, you must not let others over schedule you.
4. The Conditional ‘no’. Agree to help, but only if X number of other people will also join in the project. This method works well for friends who want to move house, or other home projects. Moving house with ten people is accomplishable in a reasonable amount of time. Moving house with two is not.
5. The Switch ‘no’. With bosses, often there isn’t a way to say ‘no’ to taking on an additional project. It’s best to keep a projects list and ask your supervisor what project you should stop working on to dedicate time to the new one. This serves two purposes: it reminds your boss of the things you are working on, and it also reminds them that if you start something new, something else must be delayed.
6. Do an Excellent Job When You DO Help. Do your best job on the projects you do say ‘yes’ to. It will help build your reputation as a person who does great work, but has limited time.

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Header photograph by Daquella manera

On your desk lies a stack of miscellaneous papers, some are forms to fill out, others reports to scan. Your computer monitor is surrounded by a sunflower of yellow post-it notes: stuff to google, people to call, errands to run. And the morning tide of email and voicemail is coming.

If you start attacking these tasks at random, you’ll have a frazzled day and you won’t finish. But, with a little clever re-arranging, you can get all this work done and have time to spare. To do this you need to borrow an old trick from the world of computers: batch processing.

Back when computers were room-sized, expensive and slow, researchers couldn’t afford to use them inefficiently. Rather than have the computer work on different tasks as they randomly came in, the computer collected similar tasks into batches. When a batch got large enough, then the computer would tackle all the similar tasks at once. This was the most time-efficient use of the computer’s scarce resources.

If you want to use your time most efficiently, you should do the same thing. In the example of your desk given above, the first thing you should do is sort your tasks into batches. Make separate piles for the forms, reports, Internet-related post-its errands and phone calls. Only then, pick a batch to work through.

If you’re filling out from and suddenly remember a phone call you need to make, drop a note in the ‘phone call’ pile, but don’t stop filling out the form. Keep plowing through those forms until they’re done. Then pick a new batch to start work on.

As a rule, you should let similar tasks build up until there are enough of them to do, rather than trying to tackle everything as it comes in. It’s much easier to grind through all the jobs of one type before moving on to the next. By using batch processing in this way you don’t lose time switching your brain from one kind of job to another. This is similar to the benefits derived from monotasking vs multitasking).

Many kinds of work are perfect for batch processing, such as mail, both electronic and snail. When letters come in, throw them into a box and take care of them once a week. It’s the rare letter that can’t wait a few days to get responded to. Check your email as infrequently as possible and only tackle it in batches.

People are also batchable. If there is an individual that you communicate with frequently, keep a list of things that you want to discuss with them. It’s more efficient to batch questions and harass them all at once rather than interrupting them throughout the day. Making someone, your boss or your spouse, into batchable work may seem cold-hearted, but it shows the other person that you respect their time.

Limit yourself to checking your social networks every other day (or as long as you can reasonably go) and then deal with all those invitations, wall posts and notifications at once. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can get through them.

Essentially, anything that has a large number of items to deal with, each of which may only take a small amount of time to do is a prime candidate for batching. Start collecting and batching tasks today and see how much more you can get done.

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Header photograph by flygraphix

Loath though I am to admit it, there’s one feature of Microsoft Windows that I missed after switching: the ability to tile windows vertically or horizontally quickly and easily.

Sometimes you want to have a browser and a document open, side-by-side without the hassle of manually arranging it

OS X, for all its productive benefits, does not make handling windows easy. Enter SizeUp, a little that program replicates the ability to tile windows and vastly surpasses it. SizeUp has changed how I use my Mac almost as much as Quicksilver.

SizeUp lets you use keyboard commands to align windows. With just a quick keystroke you can make any window fill the left, right, top or bottom half of a screen. If you don’t like what you’ve just done, another quick keyboard move and the window snaps back to the way it was before.

Keyboard commands will also send a window to any quadrant of the screen. If you use multiple monitors or spaces) there are commands to move windows between them as well.

Here’s a screenshot of my desktop with three windows arranged with SizeUp:

Finally SizeUp eliminates the #1 complaint from Windows switchers: it will maximize a window so that it takes up the full screen, not just the size that Apple thinks it should be.

Go and buy a copy today, you’ll be glad you did — like Quicksilver, SizeUp helps the computer disappear and lets you just work. The developer is also very helpful and responsive to feedback, and charges by a ‘Name Your Price’ method.

If you want to see SizeUp in action, there is a screencast you can checkout here: sizeup screencast.

There is also a free, though limited version called TwoUp that you can download here to give it a try.

Click here to buy and download the full version of SizeUp.

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Header photograph by Darwin Bell.

In the movie The Fifth Element, Bruce Willis lives in a tiny, cluttered mess of an apartment. The room is filled with junk except for one spot on the wall stenciled with the words: “KEEP CLEAR”.

For many people, their desk is like that apartment: stuff everywhere. It’s overwhelming and mentally draining to have a cluttered work area with so many things grabbing for your attention. Time management gurus chide messy desks (and with good reason) but some people, no matter how hard they try, will never have a clear desk. If you’re one of these people, don’t worry, you can still reduce your stress and reclaim space back by using that tip from The Fifth Element: declare a KEEP CLEAR zone.

Go get yourself some hazard warning tape and mark off a space about two feet by three feet on your desk, as shown below. If you have a cheap desk (like I do), go for the full effect and stencil KEEP CLEAR across it.

Now relax: allow yourself to have a cluttered workspace outside of the emergency taped area. There is such a thing as productive mess. But, the KEEP CLEAR zone is holy — it must be kept pristine. Within its borders, only work on one thing at a time.

Only the paper that you’re working on right now can go in the KEEP CLEAR box. If your working on the computer, then the keyboard and mouse can go inside the box. Everything else must stay out. The KEEP CLEAR zone not only gives you space to work, but it also focuses your attention.

As Randy Pausch said: it’s easier to get work done when it’s you vs. the one piece of paper instead of you vs. the whole desk of paper.

Why don’t you go out today and get some hazard warning tape and make your own, KEEP CLEAR zone.

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Header photograph from The 5th Element

Listening to audiobooks while exercising at the gym or doing the laundry is a great way to do useful multitasking.

But, unlike a physical book, there’s no convenient way to place a bookmark where you stop. It’s too easy to get lost in the many files or hit ‘back’ by accident and lose your progress.

However, there is a relatively simply way to make listening to your audiobooks an easier experience by using smart playlists to track what you’ve already listened to.

Here is the method I use:

• Make A Smart Playlist for The Book’s Title Make a new smart playlist and set “Album Name” to the book’s title.

• Set Files to ‘Remember Position’. Select all the files inside that smart playlist. Right click and select ‘get info’ then click on the ‘options’ tab. Make sure that ‘remember position’ is set to ‘yes’. This way, if you don’t finish a file your iPod will still pick up where you left off.

• Set the Play Counts to Zero. If you’re starting the book fresh, make sure that all the play counts are set to zero. This is done by selecting all the files, right clicking and selecting ‘reset play count’.

• Tell The Smart Playlist to Exclude What You’ve Finished. Lastly, right click on the smart playlist and add one more thing: ‘Play count is 0’.

As you listen to your audiobook, the files that you’ve finished will drop off your list. Now, the first file is always where you left off.

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Header photograph by suchitra prints

Planning to take a road trip? The road trip can be one of the greatest experiences of your life, but it’s not always an easy one. I’ve done two cross-country treks and am currently planning a third for this summer. Here are some of the things I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way).

1) Take a GPS Navigation System

First and most importantly: take a GPS unit with you. On my first road trip in 2006, I thought it would be a mildly useful device. Boy was I wrong. I came to trust the GPS with my life (quite literally) and will never travel without one again.

Having a GPS to guide you to your destination eliminates most of the stress of the journey -— no more arguing over maps and wondering where in the 4,000,000 square miles of America you are. An unexpected benefit of a GPS is that it allows you to see more. A GPS will estimate precisely how long it takes to travel between locations. With this information you can make informed decisions on how much you can see in a day. There were a number of times that I could calculate exactly how long I could spend at one site before I had to leave to see another before that one closed.

Most GPS systems will also tell you where hotels are along the route, so there is no wondering where the next rest stop will be. The car I drove (a Toyota Prius) came with GPS built in, but portable versions like tomtom can be bought to use in any car.

2) Avoid Horrible Hotels With TripAdvisor.com

Compared to most places I’ve traveled around the world, the hotels in the United States are pretty comfortable. However, that doesn’t protect you from the occasional horror hotel. If you can, take a quick look for your next hotel on TripAdvisor.com before you book the night. A few moments’ research may end up saving you from something terrible like this bed-bug infested hotel.

3) Bring a Good Guide Book

Even though a GPS can get you were you want to go, you should still bring a guide book. I recommend: Road Trip USA. Road Trip USA is perfect: the author lays out eleven, non-highway, paths across America. The book provides just enough information about interesting stops to be useful but not so much as to overwhelm. More importantly, the paths the book gives provide some structure to the journey. Even if your road trip is free-form, it’s helpful to have an outline to follow when you’re too tired to plan.

4) Buy a National Park Pass

The natural beauty of America is unparalleled, so you’ll want to take advantage of her national parks. Entrance to the National Parks individually varies from about $15 to $25. However, you can buy a National Park State Pass for $80 which grants you entrance to all the parks for the year. Given the number of parks and the services they provide, it’s a bargan. More information can be found at the National Park Service website.

5) Bring Equipment for Minor Emergencies

Luckily I never had to use them, but I carried emergency items just in case. This included road flares, a first aid kit, pocket knife and a large flashlight. Also, I carried a small tool Velcroed under the steering wheel to help get out of the car in an accident. It had a hammer for smashing the window and a special blade for cutting the seat belt. Lastly, while hiking in the Southwest, I kept on me a snakebite kit.

6) Keep Food and Water in the Car

Even though the majority of America’s highways are well-covered by fast-food joints and local diners, there may be times when you find yourself, unexpectedly, on a country road without access to anything. Always keep a couple gallons of water in the car along with basic, non-perishable food, such as health bars. I’ve gotten stuck in isolated areas and relied on these supplies. The water is especially important if you are traveling through the Mojave Desert, where you can easily drink a gallon of water an hour in the hot, dry weather.

7) Stay Wired

Most of the low-end hotels in the United States provide free Internet access and a good number of them don’t bother to password protect it. When I needed to connect to the ‘net, it never failed to just pull into the parking lot of a Motel 6 and flip open my laptop. If you need a more reliable connection, you’ll probably want to shell out for Starbuck’s monthly access plan.

8) Never Let the Gas Tank Get Half Empty

I’m overly paranoid about this, but I kept the car’s tank above half at all times, partly because I worried about being caught out on a long stretch of road without gas stations (I’m looking at you, Utah) and partly because of the next tip:

9) Take Breaks Before You Need To

I had a rule that I got out of the car every hundred miles even if I didn’t feel the need to, and even if it just meant pulling off the side of the road to stretch my legs for a moment or top up the gas. It’s too easy to get road hypnotized without noticing. Break the day into small segments and you’ll enjoy it more (and be a safer driver).

10) Take Time Off From Your Road Trip

If you find a relaxing place during your travels, take a mini-vacation from your road trip. Constantly moving, making decisions and being in new places is more taxing on the brain than you may realize. It’s good to take a bit of downtime to absorb what you are experiencing. This is one piece of advice that I didn’t follow on my first trip, and regrettably I didn’t take advantage of one of America’s most beautiful parks, Yellowstone, because I was more exhausted than I knew.

11) Become a AAA Member

Triple A membership is cheap (about $50), and if you have car problems, you don’t have to worry. I didn’t need them on my trip but I have in the past and they’ve always been reliable. I had a beat-up old car in College that I had to call AAA for help with several times, and they were always fast and helpful. More information can be found at their site.

12) Bring Audiobooks

There are only so many times you can listen to that road trip playlist before you start to go crazy — especially if you are spending a month or more on the road.

I highly recommend bringing audiobooks to help keep your mind active while driving. It also adds depth to the trip to learn about the places you’re traveling through. Three I can recommend are: Under a Banner of Heaven, about the Mormons in Utah if you’re traveling across the West, A Crack at the Edge of the World: The California Earthquake of 1906 if your planning a California road trip and Confederates in the Attic if you’re going through the South.

A free alternative to audiobooks are podcasts, though this will require you to bring your laptop to fill up your iPod. I recommend: This American Life, Radio Lab, In Our Time, On Point, On The Media, The Seminars about Long-Term Thinking, and The Dave Ramsey Show.

13) Bring Your Passport.

You never know where you may end up going. While it used to be true that you only needed a driver’s license to enter Canada and Mexico that is no longer the case.

14) Document Your Progress

I kept a daily log of the places I had seen and how far I had traveled. This was useful to keep track of where I had been and to later reconstruct the entire journey. (Google Earth is great for this) Also, if you become a AAA member, they will give you free maps of every State to help you trace your path.

If you want to get really hardcore about tracking where you’ve been, you can bring along a GPS logger. I recommend the AMOD GPS which after field-testing in Europe I’ll be bringing on my next trip this summer.

Though GPS is great for planning the details of a day’s journey, there is nothing like laying out a bunch of maps across a motel bed to get a birds-eye view of where you’ve been and where you’re going.

15) Take a High-Quality Camera

A cross-country road trip is an event you are going to want to photograph, and a disposable camera just won’t cut it. Bring a good digital camera with a high zoom. My camera for my first road trip was a Cannon S3. It has some issues with noise indoors, but for outdoor shots it’s a great camera. Also, the 12x zoom is priceless for capturing far away sights. For most people the S3 is more than enough camera — it allowed me to take some of my favorite shot. If you want to take it up a notch, I recommend the Canon 450D, the camera I’ll be bringing on my next trip.

16) Travel Alone and Travel with a Friend.

This depends on your personality, but I recommend doing at least some of the trip on your own. There is a unique feeling of introspection you can get while driving across open road by yourself. However, it’s nice to include a friend to carry some of the burden of driving and planning — I did, and ended up getting a girlfriend-turned-wife out of the experience.

Best of luck with your own trip and if you have any more suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.

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Header photograph by Wellington Grey

As part of a new series, I’ve put together a video about a time management system for teachers. In it I cover classroom management strategies, planning your day, keeping track of all your students, how to organize paperwork, sick days, big projects, how to have less stress on the job and other time management tips and skills for teachers.

Time management for teachers is available on youtube and vimeo.

The images used in this presentation come from the following Flickr users: _FXR, cleverclaire1983, serve61, Petteri Sulonen, street_spirit, MGShelton, peiqianlong, procsilas, simax105, evilerin, vox_efx, pinksherbet, srgblog, goldendragon613, visualdensity, woodleywonderworks, & jurvetson.